If the tie rods give way
Two important books have been published in English by two very different intellectuals, but united by the ability to analyse, observe and tell the events of our time beyond the dominant and conventional thought whether this belongs to a vision of the world or belongs to that competitor. There is a very great need to throw tie rods between these two territories which are drifting in opposite directions. The need to close this gap, as Erasmus did, is perhaps the imperative of the most brilliant and enlightened minds of our time. I'm talking about two people who are difficult to pigeonhole even in a profession or a social discipline. I'm talking about Francis Fukuyama and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Precisely to summarize as much as possible, the first could be inscribed in the area of, let's say, neoconservative thought that originates with Burke's reflections on the French revolution, while the second could be in the great current of the Enlightenment in its most cosmopolitan variant. But neither of them disdains to draw on ideas, reflections, ideas and solutions from the other field.
“Damn! Will there be any good ideas in the other field? We want to judge them on the basis of their value and not on the belonging of those who express them!”, one has to comment! This is what Thomas Friedman, one of the most important names in world journalism, columnist in the New York Times, bestselling author and tireless Trump flogger, also thinks when he expresses himself thus: “My political position is very eclectic. In my book [Thanks for being late, Mondadori] I explain that, for some things, I support the left of Bernie Sanders. I think health care should be paid for by the state. At the same time I agree with the editorials of the "Wall Street Journal" because I agree with the abolition of all corporate taxes to replace them with a tax on carbon emissions, a tax on weapons, a tax on sugar and a small financial transaction tax.
It is not an easy journey to cross borders without attracting the bullets of border guards. Knows something Hannah Arendt when with her The banality of evil, despite the validity of her theses, she was struck by the identity fury of her own community, including that of her closest friends. A trait that Von Trotta's films on the German philosopher reconstructs very well
The "master concept" of the story
But let's go back to Fukuyana's theoretical mix – which looks more like a modern mash-up – which somewhat irritated the critic of the liberal “The New Yorker” in reviewing his book. Fukuyama is convinced that the European-style national health service and compulsory military service are indispensable social glues to avoid the drift of identities and the maintenance of social cohesion. Fukuyama identifies the "master concept" of the story in identity and the desire for recognition. This concept not only explains current phenomena such as Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, theISIS, Brexit, the return of European nationalisms, anti-immigration movements, identity politics on campuses, and the election of Trump, but also explains those of the past such as the Protestant Reformation, the French and Russian Revolutions, Chinese communism, the civil rights movement and that of women, multiculturalism, and, also, the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Simone de Beauvoir. All of this has a common matrix, the Republic of Plato. Not a pretty mash-up, is it?
This ability to range in history, philosophy, religions, global geopolitics, mass psychology, sciences to trace the ancestors of the phenomena of our time, explained in this way in the long run, is one of the salient characteristics of the most brilliant thinkers of the generation following Fukuyama which finds sublime expressions in intellectuals such as Yuval Noah Harari or Malcolm Gladwell.
Kwame Anthony Appiah belongs to the same mold as the Israeli historian and Canadian sociologist. Like his colleagues, he grew up intellectually in a specific context, is polyglot, is cosmopolitan and is deeply rooted in two cultures, African and European. The di lui is therefore a unique observatory for judging the phenomena of our time in which the "master concept" of identity - which Appiah renames "essentialism" - has returned to dominate public behavior.
Who is it Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff intervened on these two books, who comes from one of the last territories of liberal democracy that still counts for something. For many years Ignatieff was the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party which returned to government of the large US state in 2015 under the leadership of Justin Trudeau. Ignatieff was the leader of the Liberal Party and head of the shadow cabinet from 2008 to 2011 under the Conservative government Stephen Harper. Canada is today the most interesting political laboratory of the liberalism of the future and Ignatieff has made an important contribution to this project, although under his leadership the Liberal Party suffered the greatest electoral defeat in its history.
A historian by training, he has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto. He is very familiar with the media: he has worked in the BBC, directed a documentary Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism which has received many awards, as well as the book of the same title. She wrote a memoir, Russian Albums, and his novel, scar tissue, was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize.
We are therefore pleased to offer you Ignatieff's commentary on these two important contributions on identity politics and its repercussions on liberal democracies.
The possible consequences of identity rage
Identity politics is tearing modern democracy apart. There is something insatiable about the search for some identity. We want to be recognized as equals, but we also want to be seen as unique individuals. We want group identities – such as women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities – to be recognized as equal, but we also want the wrongs these groups have suffered over time to be righted. It is hard to see how a modern democracy can meet all these demands in unison – in which all individuals are regarded as equal, their uniqueness respected as something special, and the claims of their group recognized and satisfied. Something can break, and what could give way is the very ability of liberal democratic society to stick together. Something must happen and what can happen is the loss of the capacity for social cohesion of modern democracies.
This is, in a nutshell, Francis Fukuyama's diagnosis of the identity crisis afflicting modern liberal democracy. Fukuyama, a prolific social theorist at Stanford University, is best known as the author of The end of the story e The last man (1992). In reality he never said that the story ended with the fall of communism. What was finished was the Marxist vision of a revolutionary transition to a collectivist society. Far from being a triumphant apologist for liberal democracy, he argued that, without the competition of alternative utopias, the democratic system would face a bleak future. His new book Identity he remains critical of the ability of modern liberal democracies to rise to the identity challenges that threaten to destroy them.
The analysis and remedies of Fukuyama
Right-wing populism, writes Fukuyama, has fueled the resentments of those who have been excluded from the rise of the accredited elites who dominate the media, high finance and universities. Left-wing populists have stoked the resentment of minorities, while making no effort to reunite them with the white majority, from which they have effectively split. Nor can the liberal celebration of diversity mend the social fracture with a rhetoric of victimization. Diversity may be an aspect of existence, but it only becomes a common value if different people actually live together. Instead in the multicultural cities of the XNUMXst century – Los Angeles, London, Toronto – they don't live together, they live side by side, in self-segregated neighborhoods by race, language, religion and ethnicity.
If identity politics is polarizing democratic societies to the point of no return, what is the way out? Fukuyama's remedies include compulsory military and civilian military service so that young people learn to work with people of different origins to build actions and projects together. “Compulsory military service would be a contemporary form of classical republicanism, a form of democracy that has shown that it can foster the public virtue and enthusiasm of citizens rather than the pursuit of their individual interests and needs,” he writes in a passage of the book.
In addition to military service, Fukuyana ardently defends a highly controversial notion – what the Germans call a Leitkultur – that is, a guiding culture, which all newcomers should adhere to and which they should learn in order to become citizens. Another decisive social glue is the national health system that unites all citizens of a community, regardless of their identities. America certainly needs a publicly funded health care system, but countries that have national health care, such as Canada and Britain, have not escaped identity polarization.
A true national identity policy would require much more than investing in shared public goods. It would also require policies that expand people's opportunities and reduce inequalities through the taxation of inheritance and wealth. A joint campaign against the economic inequalities that cut across our racial, gender and ethnic identities could bring them together better than anything else. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded, but let us remember what he faced: The resistance of the privileged is bound to be fierce.
Fukuyama's remedies may be symptomatic of the problem at hand: too conservative for liberals and progressives, too statist for conservatives. But there is something about them that makes sense: the instinct for identity politics is a symptom of democracy's decay and a deviation from its true purpose. Which is to unite, coalesce groups in an effort to overcome differences, strengthen shared public goods, rebuild the steps of economic opportunities and enhance the common human identity.
The theory of essentialism by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah brings to this debate a strong sensitivity to the lies we tell about our personal identity narratives. His own background perfectly exemplifies the complexities we often deny, for example, when using racial typologies of “white” and “black”. Appiah's grandfather was Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor in Clement Attlee's Labor government from 1945 to 1951. Cripps' daughter married Appiah's father, an Asanti tribal leader, who joined Kwame Nkrumah's independence movement in colonial Ghana. Appiah is pleased with the confusion that results when people fail to "place" someone like him who is as comfortable in Ghana as in an English county.
As he states in an elegant and ironic book, The Lies That Bind, who wrote after a Reith Lecture for the BBC in 2016, the confusion its status causes in people stems from a crucial fallacy he calls “essentialism”. There is no essential identity called "black" or "white," any more than there is in the binary meaning of "gender." Identity is a lie that imprisons us when we allow it to take hold, but, at the same time, it remains just as much a lie when we assume we are free to choose our identities at will.
Appiah's stories about identity serve to illuminate the complex interplay between what we inherit and what we ourselves process.
The open source code of religious identity
Religious identity, he writes, is not fixed by doctrine, but is an ever-evolving inner dialogue between faith and doubt. Appiah's Anglican mother once told William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, that she had difficulty believing in any of the 39 articles that define the Anglican religion. “Yes, it's hard to believe,” she replied, leaving it to her mother to understand, for the rest of her life, that doubt was not the enemy of faith, but its constant companion.
His Christian identity left room for doubt, but likewise, other believers believe that their faith requires no second thoughts of them. Fundamentalists advocate a return to scriptural orthodoxy to fix an identity set in stone so that it will not be scratched by modernity. But religious identities refuse to be fossilized in this way. Religions survive, Appiah argues, precisely because they are "open source" code. The Book of Leviticus ofOld Testament it may outlaw homosexuality, but gay Christian and Jewish believers have found ways, as Appiah says, of interpreting that injunction. Finally, big-hearted believers don't care much about the boundaries set by orthodoxy. Appiah's father was a practicing Christian, but he thought there was nothing unusual in honoring his Asante ancestors once a year by pouring Kaiser Schnapps (“the liqueur of kings”) on the family shrines, a practice he still continues his son.
The lies of essentialism
Nationalists, like religious fundamentalists, insist that there is an essence of nationality that identifies you, like paint, with specific characteristics. In reality, national identity is a sort of ongoing competition to define who and what belongs to the national "we". In 2016, Boris Johnson said Brexit was about “the right of the people of this country to determine their own destiny”. What people, Appiah wonders, is the former UK foreign secretary talking about? Not the Scots, not the Northern Irish, not the Londoners who overwhelmingly voted to stay. Brexit has laid bare all the differences – regional, interests, incomes, history and education – that “essentialist” British nationalism wants to overlook.
As for race, Appiah dismantles both established categories of "race" and that universal moral excommunication -- "racism" -- by reminding us of a time when educated people believed we were all descended from Adam and refused to see characteristics." racial” as irrevocable markers of difference. The philosopher Leibniz, for example, thought that language was a deeper sign of identity than race. It was only with the rise of European empires and the subjugation of non-white races, Appiah says, that our understanding of racial identity became entangled in a vision that blurs the differences we should rather ascribe to history, culture – and time. imperialism – with biological differences.
Even our cultural differences are being "essentialized", with Europeans believing they are heirs of something called "Western civilization", one of those lies that prevent us from seeing what the West owes to other cultures. When we say that Aristotle, Plato and Socrates are fathers of the western canon, we forget that Greek and Latin were almost completely extinct in northern Europe in the Middle Ages and Europe recovered their work thanks to the translations of Arab and Islamic scholars of Cordoba, Seville and Toledo.
Appiah is scornful of controversies about "cultural appropriation," the belief that when people write or act on principles from other cultures, they're engaging in some kind of theft. The very idea of cross-cultural appropriation is wrong, Appiah argues, because he treats culture as if it were an object of property that belongs to only one group. It is as if the defenders of cultural integrity were trying to enforce the intellectual property regimes of the big pharmaceutical company. Culture doesn't really belong to anyone.
Meritocracy is not an answer
So how does Appiah think one can escape the prison of "essentialist" identity? One answer, which he subjects to close scrutiny, is the idea of a meritocratic society. In 1958 the British sociologist Michael Young developed the vision of such a society in which public recognition, status and power would be determined not by race, class, gender or culture, but by personal abilities, determined by educational credentials . The university has thus become the temple of this vision. Many people have gotten a good education to escape the confines of their hereditary identities.
The irony – which Young himself sees – is that a society that believes it offers equal opportunity through education has come to legitimize new inequalities based on those same credentials. The meritocratic ideal promises an escape from identity politics, but only fuels the identity anxieties of those who have abandoned the meritocratic ladder. Dropouts and blue-collar workers pushed Britain into Brexit and Donald Trump into the White House. Universities once believed they were the answer to identity inequalities. Now they realize they are part of that problem.
The solution, which would truly take us out of the prison of identity politics and the false solution of meritocracy, would be to conscientiously ignore every sign of identity – race, class, gender, education, destiny – and focus only on temperament and on character when we assign status, power and prestige. An uncompromising individualism of this kind - one that consciously seeks to see and evaluate individuals separately from their group identities - could help us overcome the demands for recognition and reparation that divide us so deeply.
We are a long way from this utopia, but it is the one that John Stuart Mill and Martin Luther King have shown us and which still seems to be the right destination.
Francis Fukuyama, The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pages 240.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, Profile, pages 256.
